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86 CH APTER SI X The World of the Hindu I wish to hear from you how this world was, and how in future it will be. What is its substance, and whence proceeded animate and inanimate things? Into what has it been resolved and into what will its dissolution again occur? How were the elements manifested? —Maitreya in Viṣṇu Purāṇa I, 1 Hinduism, like all traditional religions, offers a comprehensive world view in which everything has its place and where all individual parts contribute to a meaningful total picture. All astronomical, geographical, historical, cultural information that was available at a given time is overarched by a philosophy that anchored its ethics, its anthropology, and its sociopolitical laws ultimately in a creator and ruler of the universe. Throughout its long history, under the influence of expanding horizons and growing detail knowledge, the worldview of the Hindus has changed and developed. After the formation of sectarian Hinduism , differing notions of the identity of the Supreme Being and varying sets of sectarian mythologies brought about sectarian worldviews, which were laid out in the sectarian Purāṇas. In all their forms, however, Hindu world views maintained their influence on the daily life and thought of Hindus, and contemporary efforts to integrate contemporary scientific knowledge into the traditional framework—often backed by Indian scientists of repute—prove how important it has always been for Hindus to possess a workable and viable worldview. V EDIC CR EATION MY THS In the Ṛgveda, pṛthvī-dyaus, Earth-and-Heaven, are divinities.1 India shares this heaven-earth division and religion with a good many other peoples, who similarly explain the whole world as having originated from a pair of world parents. “Which was the former, which of them the later? How born? O sages, THE WOR LD OF THE HINDU 87 who discerns? They bear of themselves all that has existence. Day and Night revolve as on a wheel. . . .”2 But this simple scheme could not accommodate the numerous new developments in Vedic religion, which uses a basic partition of the universe into tri-loka, “three-worlds,” the combination of the places for gods, ancestors, and men. To each of the worlds eleven devas were assigned, with various functions. As S. Kramrisch explains: Heaven and earth, as dyadic monad, are a closed unit. It must be violated, split into its components, and these must be separated, lest they fall together and the world-to-be collapses. The act of creative violation and the power of keeping apart the pair so that they become Father Heaven and Mother Earth between whom all life is engendered is the test by which a creator god establishes his supremacy. He makes the Dyad into Two. He is the One and at the same time the Third, who plays the leading part in the cosmic drama. He is hero and artist in one.3 Speculation about the origin of the world is one of the staples of almost all religions, and quite frequently much of the rest of their philosophies is derived from this starting point. The earlier Vedic hymns have many scattered references to the origin of the world, involving a variety of gods; it is only in the later hymns that anything like a definite doctrine emerges. One hymn is addressed to Viśvakarman, The One-who-makes-all.4 He is called mighty in mind and power, maker, disposer, and most lofty presence, the Father who made us, the One beyond the seven ṛṣis. He is described as not to be found, “another thing has risen up among you.”5 The two best-known Vedic descriptions of creation, however, are the socalled puruṣa sūkta and the nāsadīya sūkta. The former, true to the basic Vedic philosophy, derives everything from a ritual sacrifice. Thus it goes: Thousand-headed was the puruṣa, thousand-eyed, thousand-footed. He embraced the earth on all sides, and stood beyond the breadth of ten fingers. The puruṣa is this all, that which was and which shall be. He is Lord of immortality , which he outgrows through (sacrificial) food. One fourth of him is all beings. The three fourths of him is the immortal in heaven. This puruṣa begets virāj, the “widespread,” and both together bring forth puruṣa, the son, who becomes the sacrificial victim of the great sacrifice of the gods. From this great sacrifice originate the verses of the Vedas, horses...

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